In our second year-ending visit to the 2010 Crazy Talk vaults, we look at some stories with a festive theme.
30,000 reasons to throw up
There’s nothing like a good Christmas dinner to share with your folks, and this was indeed nothing like that. Not satisfied with being the fattest woman on record ever to give birth, 292kg Donna Simpson from New Jersey, USA, now has the title of fattest woman in the world in her sights. To help achieve this, Donna ate a 30,000-calorie Christmas dinner this year. If you thought you overate at this time of year, just listen to this: she put away two 11kg (25lb) turkeys with 2.3kg of stuffing, two whole hams, 6.8kg (15lbs) of potatoes, three litres of gravy, three litres of cranberry sauce and 9kg (20lbs) of vegetables, with five loaves of bread on the side. Dessert consisted of marshmallow, cream cheese, whipped cream and cookies. "I eat as much as I want, whenever I want, but at this time of year I really go all out,” she said unapologetically. "Christmas should give you carte blanche to do whatever you want." How many more Christmases Donna will actually live to see before she orphans her two children is anyone’s guess.
Small offering
From someone enormous and dull to something small and fascinating… Engineers in Scotland have come up with a Christmas card so small that you need a microscope to see it – all to prove the wonders of nanotechnology, those tiny little robots that will soon take over the world. The card is 200 micro-metres (that millionths of a metre) by 290, and you can see how small that is from the photo. “You could fit over half a million of them onto a standard A5 Christmas card,” says Prof David Cumming of Glasgow University, one of the engineers who pioneered the card, “but signing them would prove to be a bit of a challenge.”
Santa Claus is coming to take you down
A cop who went undercover in Sicily recently to capture a mobster running a protection racket used an ingenious, though slightly baffling, disguise. Having captured the transaction with a shopkeeper on a hidden camera, the Carabinieri and a colleague (who wasn’t dressed up as an elf or anything) stepped in the arrest the member of the seasonal-sounding Santapaola mafia family. No reason was given for the outfit, but perhaps it was just to make the mobster feel even guiltier about the estimated €30,000 he’d extorted from the shopowner in a 10-year period, Christmas or not…
Bloody elf ire
Are you sitting down? We’re about to reveal the top Christmas film as voted for by users of esteemed film organisation myvouchercodes.co.uk. No, not It’s a Wonderful Life or anything with Bing Crosby in it – it’s that favourite of lazy festive afternoons, Elf, starring Will Ferrell. If you don’t know it, it’s the traditional Christmas tale of a human brought up by elves sent to an American metropolis to get into all sorts of amusing scrapes in a green felt hat. We think it beats anything by Charles Dickens hands down. But then we also doubt anything written by Dickens has ever grossed $220.4m at cinemas worldwide.
One wild party
We usually let ourselves get smashed at the annual New Year’s Eve party, but one Polish man living in Bochum, Germany, seemingly did more than that, and shouldn’t have been surprised to wake up with a headache. When he went to the doctor to have what he thought was a cyst removed in August this year, it was discovered that he’d been shot in the head with a .22 calibre bullet and that the wound had healed around it. It transpired that he remembered receiving a blow to the head when “very drunk” at either a 2004 or 2005 New Year’s party, and it was suggested that perhaps a drunken reveller discharged the firearm in the air, with the insensible 35-year-old Pole bearing the brunt. Stick to party poppers and lemonade this New Year’s Eve, it’s safer…
Comments
Add a comment